‘There’s a Dark Cloud Over Our Sport’

The German biathlete Laura Dahlmeier shooting, one of the sport’s disciplines, during a training session. Three biathletes, two Russians and a Lithuanian, recently had positive drug tests.

Richard Heathcote / Getty Images

February 6, 2014

Sports of The Times

By JULIET MACUR

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — When Don Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, heard that three biathletes had tested positive for a “nonspecific substance” about a week before the Olympics, I could hear him sigh over the phone.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “You’ve got to wonder if it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

Catlin had a good reason to be grim about the possibility that more biathletes were doping, which in this most recent case involved a designer version of the endurance-boosting drug EPO, according to two scientists with knowledge of the matter. He told me that biathletes were “always at the center of looking for new drugs.”

He would know. Twelve years ago, Catlin led the team of scientists at the Salt Lake City Games that discovered three positives for a new EPO-like drug, darbepoetin, on the final day of those Games. The athletes — two Russians and a Spaniard — who failed that test were from cross-country skiing, a sport that makes up half of the biathlon. The other half of biathlon is shooting.

Catlin last week admitted publicly — for the first time — that those three positive tests at the Salt Lake Games were only “the tip of the iceberg” of the positive tests for darbepoetin in Salt Lake City. He told me that two biathletes from those Games had also tested positive for the drug on the final day, but that he and the International Olympic Committee president at the time, Jacques Rogge, had decided against pursuing their cases because “it would raise a huge stink around the world.”

It also could have created major legal problems. Catlin and Rogge suspected that the first three athletes who tested positive for darbepoetin would challenge those cases at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. They would question the science, the paperwork and the procedures. For Catlin and the I.O.C., it would require putting together three complex, but airtight, legal cases. Preparing two extra cases, Catlin said, seemed untenable.

“If you lose in C.A.S., you got a lot of egg on your face, so Jacques asked me one question, ‘Can you win the C.A.S. case?’ ” Catlin said of the initial three positives. “I said, ‘Yes, but it will take a lot of work just for these three.’ So we decided to stop there. We couldn’t risk taking on all five. Lose just one of those and your credibility on the issue is shot.”

So the two biathletes, who were never identified publicly, got lucky. That’s such an outrageous notion that I had Catlin repeat it to me several times.

The I.O.C. should have pushed forward with those cases. To bury them was wrong. But the flood of positive tests during the sport’s biggest event was a testament to how far biathlon had fallen.

Last week, biathlon stumbled yet again, when three biathletes — two Russians and a Lithuanian — were suspended. “I still believe that most of the top people are not doping,” said Sara Studebaker, an American biathlete who will compete in Sochi. “But I guess it really doesn’t matter what you believe. There’s a dark cloud over our sport, and now the Russians they have a big stain on them. It’s bad for everybody.”

Tim Burke, the top American biathlete in Sochi, suggested to me on Thursday several ways to persuade biathletes to stop doping. He suggested a lifetime ban for athletes who test positive even once, and said the national federations also should be penalized.

Burke is on to something. If countries — not just Russia — fail to control their athletes year after year, it’s time to make the national federations and Olympic committees accountable. Limit their participation on the World Cup circuit. Bar them from the Olympics. Whatever the penalty, it should be something painful enough to make national governing bodies invested in cleaning up their sport’s mess.

In biathlon and cross-country skiing, that mess has existed for decades. The sports remain the Winter Games’ version of cycling, which for generations has been mired in the doping problems that are rife in endurance sports.

Anders Besseberg, president of the International Biathlon Union, said the organization had been doing all it could. It uses a biological passport program to monitor certain biological markers in athletes’ urine and blood. Any variation of those markers could suggest that the athlete is doping, and that athlete is then targeted for extra testing.

But no matter what the I.B.U. does, there will always be athletes who cheat.

“I’m so sorry to say that in certain countries there is still a culture of cheating, and I think that’s the main problem now,” he said. “Those people think they are smarter than us, that we’ll never catch them.”

Some athletes will never be scared clean. But after all the money that the Brooklyn Nets billionaire owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov has poured into the Russian biathlon federation, of which he is the president, it looks as if he could have spent more on antidoping measures.

At the very least, he should have been aware that his athletes might have been tempted to use drugs to cheat, since at least one has served a suspension before. And while biathlon is one of the top winter sports in Russia — with great rewards for those who succeed in it — it also appears easy to obtain performance-enhancing drugs in this country.

In a report this week by the German broadcaster WDR, two journalists traveled to Moscow to buy a powerful drug called full-size MGF, which increases muscle size and strength but has been tested only on animals. They said the person who sold them the drug, which is not detectable using current antidoping drug screenings, was a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

To be sure, Russia is not the only country with a doping problem, but it is clear that the nation’s government and sporting officials must do something monumental to address the issue.

They need to find a way — the Olympic movement needs to find a way — to ensure that nothing lurks below the tip of the iceberg.